The end of process? I think not!

I read a challenging statement from Ross Mayfield on the end of process. I don’t buy it! Process is what provides us with a comfort zone, a path to follow, especially when times get hard. Processes change in time to adapt to changing contexts, they will never disappear; sorry Ross, not even formal business processes. The fact that some organizations are in a downward spiral when it comes to innovation has a lot to do with the shareholder induced efficiency and cost cutting dogma’s. This is not about process, this is about context! We just need to recognize the changing context and adapt. To adapt we need to work together in multi-disciplinary teams (Toyota) instead of squeezing every last drop of life blood out of our employees and suppliers (GM) to gain short term advantages at the cost of optimizing ourselves to our grave. The processes should be owned by the people who act them out, not forced to wear as straight jackets by the top brass.

A good process is like a good contract. It doesn’t deal with any and all we want to do together, it describes what we want to do together and provides handles for when we hit an exception to the rule. As soon as a process or contract doesn’t, they become straight jackets instead of a means to provide direction and the necessary safeguards to get there. Flexibility built in! Innovation is for the most part recombining existing solutions and there are proven processes with which we solve our contradictions to innovate. Practically every contradiction has been encountered before and people have come up with principles to deal with them. What we need therefore is not a process to innovate, but a process to come up with the right way to innovate within our context. Try putting that into a contract! You can in a process!

Ross' product is a first step to support part of the needed flexibility with web based technology from a more human point of view. I hope he keeps improving on socialtext, I just hope he won’t forget the role processes play in our daily life.